Dannika Dark - Six Months

Reno tightened his jaw.

“Guess she didn’t want to be your bitch,” Denver muttered matter-of-factly.

Reno was out of his chair in a heartbeat. The soup splattered on the floor and he seized Denver’s throat.

“Cut it out!” Austin shouted, wedging between them. “Dammit, Reno, you know he didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

“Maybe not,” Reno bit out, giving Denver a hostile glare, “but you ever call her a bitch again, no Packmaster will be able to stop what I’m going to do to you.”

Denver wiped the soup off his arm and shook some of it off his foot. “When the hell did bitch become a bad word in this pack? Maybe you need to lighten up, big brother. Humans don’t like all that serious Terminator shit. Someone tracking our ass down is just another day in the life of the Cole family. But April goes out for laser tag and finds herself in the middle of a showdown. That’s some heavy shit. And why don’t you explain how you helped her cope when you got home? Did you give her a beer? Watch a little TV? Yeah, we all saw the panties by the door.” Denver waved his hand and walked away. “I’m outta here.”

“I need everyone upstairs except Reno,” Austin said in an authoritative voice. That was the tone he used as an alpha, the one that every Shifter wolf heeded whether in human or wolf form. There was power in his words when he summoned it, and without an argument, everyone drifted upstairs and left them alone.

After Lexi shut the door, Austin folded his arms. “Talk.”

Reno pinched his chin and slanted his eyes away. He didn’t want to talk, but Austin was the only one in the house he could confide in. “While you guys were still cleaning up the mess with Sanchez, Trevor came by and took April away. She’s gone. For good.”

It took a second before Austin decided what to say. “And you’re okay with that?”

Reno’s eyes slid up. “Do I look okay with it?”

Austin sat across from him and touched the small cleft in his chin. Reno noticed a few spatters of blood on his dark green shirt. “I can think of at least four Shifter women who’ve had their eye on mating with you. Good women from respectable packs. All I’m saying is that you want someone who’s going to age at the same speed. I get the fascination; we’ve all had crushes on a human at one time or another. They’re the forbidden fruit and incomparable to our women. But you don’t want to get your emotions mixed up with one of them. They don’t understand our ways—they don’t mate for life. Men leave their families and some want nothing to do with their own children.” He shook his head. “And that’s another thing. Shifters and humans can’t have children together. Think about what you’d be giving up. She did you a favor.”

Reno stretched his legs and laced his fingers together on his lap. “Did our dad ever tell you about Faye?”

Austin shook his head and Reno continued.

“This was long before you were born. Faye was a good bitch from a respectable pack, and we had a thing. A good thing. She was a tough woman with black hair and blue eyes—all the men had their sights on her, but she was mine. We knew right away we had a connection, and it got serious.”

“How serious?”

“Serious enough that I was going to ask her to be my life mate. Turns out I couldn’t give her what she wanted.”

“And what was that?” Austin knitted his brows.

“Children.” Reno took a deep and painful breath. “I’m sterile.”

Austin sat back, staring pensively to the right. “Sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, that’s not something I want to share with the others, if you catch my meaning. It’s better that you were born the alpha. Maybe that’s why the gene skipped me, little brother. Faye didn’t stick around; she found herself a man who could give her what I couldn’t. So that bullshit about wolves mating for life is only a standard we hold ourselves to. Maybe we honor it more than humans do, but it doesn’t make us any better than them. I don’t believe in destiny. I believe in finding something good and making it work.”

It had taken years for Reno to get over losing Faye. He didn’t reveal to Austin how her rejection broke him in ways he couldn’t have imagined. That he’d pursued her hard, even after she chose another man. He’d loved that woman and the last time he saw her, she slapped him in the face and told him he was a disgrace to his own kind—that no woman would ever choose to mate with him. Faye wanted children more than love. Reno would have built a pyramid for her. And yet Faye didn’t hold a candle to a human who had stolen his heart with her whimsical smile and unyielding acceptance.

Austin leaned forward, his icy blue eyes pinning Reno to the chair. “Don’t be so quick to knock the idea of destiny. I’ve always felt a connection with Lexi. It’s not something I can explain—it’s a pull in my gut that tells me she’s the one. When she’s in trouble, I can sense it. There’s something about the way we fit that doesn’t always make sense, but we’re like two puzzle pieces coming together. I wouldn’t be a complete man without her, and that’s as good as destiny for me. We’ve all heard the stories about soul mates and the bond between two Shifters who were born for each other. I believe it because I have that with Lexi. It’s an inherent attraction that brings us together like magnets. Just give it some time and you’ll find it with a Shifter. You can’t have that kind of bond with a human.”

Reno shifted in his chair. All the things Austin had just listed off were exactly how he felt about April. “So you’re saying if Lexi had turned out to be a human and not one of us, you would have let her go?”

Austin flexed his jaw and sat back, the lamp beside him shining on his tatted shoulder. Cold weather didn’t faze Austin; he ran hot and often wore T-shirts or tank tops in winter. “Lexi would have still been in our pack if she chose—that’s a given. Not all humans can accept that people like us exist. I don’t know if I could love someone that hard and let them slip through my hands because they have a shorter expiration date. But I don’t have that choice to make, you do. April is a smart girl and she lived with us long enough to see this was the wrong life for her. Lynn still struggles with it, and she’s been talking about sending Maizy away to live with her grandparents or shipping her to boarding school when she’s older. She’s worried we’re a bad influence on her even though she’s found a home with our pack. Lynn doesn’t want to start over on her own, and she has a place in our family. Humans don’t think the way we do. They don’t get our lifestyle. They don’t cope well in a crowded house full of people who aren’t even related. She doesn’t like having to hustle downstairs whenever I want to get frisky with my woman. I don’t understand how anyone could ship their kid off, but humans do it all the time. They leave them in day care and send them to summer camp.” He shook his head and ruffled up his hair. “They don’t raise a family the same way we do—that’s part of the disconnect. Maybe April wants a family and that’s something she can’t have with a Shifter. We live in a dangerous world, Reno. Do you think it’s fair to ask a human to give up family and normalcy to live with Breed?”

Reno released a heavy sigh and rubbed his face. April was adamant about not wanting kids, but she was only twenty-three. Does a person really know what they want at that age?

Then it hit him like a sledgehammer.

She didn’t want to commit, plain and simple. A female Shifter her age wouldn’t hesitate to settle down with a good man, because Shifters were tenacious and decisive. Humans were uncertain about their feelings and always changing their minds. She didn’t want to live in his world, but she also didn’t want to force him into making a choice between love and family. And she was right. It would have torn him apart. April could have taken advantage of his hospitality, but in the end, she’d walked away with nothing. Maybe it was for the better. She would have never found happiness if she’d felt indebted to him.